CA GAFE SUMMIT: Day Two

Yesterday was the second and final day of the GAFE Summit. I attended four more sessions which were focused around specific tools and strategies than those of the previous day which were a bit more big picture focused. I've used the same format from yesterday and captured my biggest take-away, actions inspired, and remaining questions from each session to provide you with some insight on Day Two. I even remembered to include links to the session descriptions and my notes from the sessions this time!

CA GAFE SUMMIT: Day One

It's officially "intermission" of the CA GAFE Summit 2014 and I thought I'd share a bit about my day with you. I decided the best way to summarize my experience today was to share the biggest take-away and remaining questions I had about each session. Also, in most cases I was inspired to plan for or take specific action (either in the future or immediately) and I thought that would be helpful to include. Without further ado...

Teachable Moments: The URL

Has a student ever asked a question during class that has caused you to stop and "Google it?" This is an almost daily occurrence in my classroom especially when we are reading any sort of text (especially non-fiction) or observing a special holiday. If you left it up to your students to choose the best result to find the answer to their question, would they make a good choice?

Revival

Well, I guess at this point I don't have followers outside of my graduate classes in Instructional Technology. So, this is a hello to those future visitors who are wondering about this blog!

As I near the end of my time as a graduate student (MEd. Instructional Technology, UMUC) I feel more and more compelled to share the knowledge and skills I have gained over the past two years with fellow educators. I am also eager to build new relationships with other educators who share a passion for integrating technology in the early childhood classroom.

As a military spouse, I already have had invested technology commitments at several different schools and know that this trend will ultimately continue as our journey with the Navy continues. I hope that this blog, in it's revival, will help me in continuing to share technology integration experiences, tools, and ideas with colleagues past, present, and future.

Since this blog began as an assignment for a graduate course and therefore, it does include some helpful tips about integrating technology in the early childhood classroom already. However, there has been a hiatus of activity for almost a year. So, let me share a brief preview of what you can expect in the near future...

- An update on my current classroom technologies and how they are being used
- An overview of my experiences introducing my class of 2nd graders to Google Apps for Education
- A look at a sample Digital Literacy Workshop created for elementary educators
- A preview of my team's work surrounding an OHEF Grant: A Digital City of Stories
- A reflection on my experiences applying for a variety of Google training opportunities
- A synopsis of my on-going acclamation to a MacBook Pro Retina from PC (1 day in so far!)

I look forward to sharing many of these posts with you and am especially excited about the professional learning community that may ensure from the discussions and collaborations that take place here!

Thanks for joining the revival!

Challenges of Creating My Own Website

While I have this blog to update my technology tips and new discoveries, it does not serve the purpose of being a hub for my classroom. I have even set up a blog for my classroom so that I may easily post weekly updates with important dates, reminders, and other information to keep my parents and students informed. However, a blog alone does not fully meet my needs for what I wish to have available to my students and parents on a regular basis.

Therefore, I have begun constructing a classroom website that allows me to do a little bit more than my blog does....or does it? Here are just a few of my challenges in learning HTML and CSS construction of a website!

- Did you know that special fonts you download on your computer and use in your website cannot be used on computers that do not have that special font installed?

I didn't! What a surprise when I finally unveiled my website to my family who I thought was able to see everything, only to discover they were praising bland font on a dark background. It was so kind of them to encourage and praise my efforts, but boy did I feel silly once I realized the quality of website they were seeing! Gotta love my family for their never-ending support of all that I do! 

While I found some interesting tutorials to utilize Webfonts, the particular free fonts I had found for download were not available freely as Webfonts. So, I ended up having to go back and recreate my website from scratch and creating JPG images of each header and menu item I wanted that would utilize the particular font I had fallen in love with for my site. It proved not to be extremely painful, but was still time consuming! Good news, is I finally got the font and design for my website that I desired!

Perseverance and patience turned out to be the most important things I needed to tackle this challenge!

- You would not believe how hard it is to get your blog feed embedded in the website you create!

I have spent several hours now working with a variety of tools to embed blog feeds and have yet to be successful! Unlike Google Calendar and other online tools, blog feeds are not as easy to import into your website because of how frequently they are updated. Not to mention, in a sense they are already a tool within a website. 

If anyone has any ideas on how to get past this hurdle, let me know! I'll keep you posted if I find a solution that works! 

Those have been my biggest challenges so far and I am sure there are more to come! Stay tuned!


You can visit my site here. Please know that it is a work in progress and what you see there one day might not be there the next. As usual, any suggestions, feedback, and thoughts are always welcome!

Young Learners and the Smartboard

While more and more classrooms are being equipped with Smartboard technology, it remains a daunting task for teachers to fully utilize the many capabilities of the board with young learners. Students between the ages of three and eight encounter several unique challenges when working with the Smartboard and teachers are frequently overwhelmed with where to start or how to create material to be used with the board. While there is so much that could be covered, I have selected just a few of my favorite tips that have been received as the most eye-opening to fellow teachers.

Adapt:

• Touches
• Small children sometimes have trouble navigating the Smartboard using their hands because they haven't figured out how to apply that "just right" amount of pressure. This quickly becomes the frustrating battle of moving objects only a few centimeters at a time. Try having your students make a fist with their thumb adjacent to their pointer finger and placing their whole hand in this position on the Smartboard to select and manipulate objects.
• Pointers
• Height is also a frequent problem with Smartboards, particularly when they are unilaterally installed school wide at one set height. Stock up on as many pointers as you can! Amazon has a great selection for a good price. Allow students to use pointers to reach those items at the top of the screen or across the screen from them. This will also cut down on the shadow effect that commonly stumps young learners as they go to click on an object or write only to find their few blocked by their bodies. By using pointers, students are able to better understand how to re-position themselves due to their greater range of motion.
• Wireless Keyboard
• Many teachers have expressed frustration at having to sit at the computer during Smartboard lessons to type in information on the computer when a link takes them to a search engine or other interactive website. If this is your case it is worth talking to your tech team about investing in a Wireless Keyboard (preferably one with a track pad) that you, or your students, can use to manipulate websites and other features of Smart Notebook software more easily. Not to mention, this can be a great alternative for those students who still struggle to interact physically with the Smartboard or who are unable to interact due to other limitations.
• Re-Alignment Screen
• The need to re-align your Smartboard must occur at least once, if not fifteen times a day in an early childhood classroom. It never seems like the projector cart can stay clear of the stray student wandering past and is constantly just the slightest bit off, making it difficult to interact successfully with the Smartboard. Make the re-alignment process a routine that your students are a part of - all too frequently the 10-15 seconds it takes to re-align Smartboards has caused student focus to crack and crumble. I recommend requiring the students to count with me, run through the sight word list, or clap every time I press a re-alignment point. Additionally, to ensure your Smartboard is at its most accurate, try touching the pen (or your finger) to a point about 6-8 inches away from the re-alignment point and then dragging it over to the exact spot in the middle of the point. This will speed up the process and prevent you from having to go back and re-do points where you may not have hit the target exactly!

Don't Work Alone:

• Smart Exchange
• I have been surprised by the number of teachers that are not aware of Smart Exchange. It is an online community (requires a sign-up, but is still free!) comprised of teachers and other educational professionals who can post and retrieve lesson covering a BROAD spectrum of curriculum. Smart Exchange is a great place to start when you are creating a lesson. There is no reason to re-invent the wheel when another teacher might have already compiled a lesson for the curriculum you are interested in teaching. If you don't find exactly what you are looking for, it is still a good idea to find a "shell" that you can adapt by substituting your own information, or to find ideas for how you might like to go about teaching a particular lesson. It is a wonderful free resource that teachers who are both experienced and inexperienced with the Smartboard should check out!
• Team Files
• If you are fortunate to work with a team of early childhood educators, take the opportunity to divide and conquer a unit or set of lessons you might want to utilize the Smartboard for. You might consider each taking a lesson and storing it on a group file on your school network. Or, perhaps you might want to get in touch with colleagues at other schools if the project is particularly large. It is best not to try and take it all on yourself, working in teams is a great opportunity to learn from other's experiences and tackle new challenges to make them more manageable.

While these tips will be extremely helpful in fully realizing the potential of a Smartboard in the early childhood classroom, the best thing you can do for your students is to model expected behaviors repeatedly. By showing children what you expect their interactions with the Smartboard to be, including the steps they should take in troubleshooting, taking turns, and navigating home, you will find yourself able to successfully utilize the Smartboard one lesson at a time!